Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009.Much of the drop in blogging among younger internet users may be attributable to changes in social network use by teens and young adults. Nearly three quarters (73%) of online teens and an equal number (72%) of young adults use social network sites. By contrast, older adults have not kept pace; some 40% of adults 30 and older use the social sites in the fall of 2009.

New survey results also show that among adults 18 and older, Facebook has taken over as the social network of choice; 73% of adult profile owners use Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% use LinkedIn. “Blogging appears to have lost its luster for many young users,” said Amanda Lenhart, lead author of the report. “The fad stage is over for teens and young adults and the move to Facebook — which lacks a specific tool for blogging within the network — may have contributed to the decline of blogging among young adults and teens.”

Other findings include:

Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers – just 8% of online teens 12-17 say they ever use Twitter, a percentage similar to the number who use virtual worlds. This puts Twitter far down the list of popular online activities for teens and stands in stark contrast to their record of being early adopters of nearly every online activity.

Click here for the rest of the report, including a link to download it as a PDF.

“The risk posed by social media for your company … exists whether you participate or not,’ observed Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, an IR website and communications firm out of Toronto. ‘If you’ve ignored social media and said there are too many risks, we‘re not going to get involved, then you are putting your company at higher risk … than if you know how to use the tools. The market doesn’t care whether or not you’re there. They’re going to use the channels that are most readily available to them to put their message out.’

Heaps made those comments during a panel discussion yesterday in downtown Minneapolis on best practices for using social media to communicate material information, co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney law firm and the Twin Cities NIRI chapter.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, collectively referred to as ‘social media’, have worked their way into the IR conversation. As evidence of how hot the topic is, NIRI chapters as well as consultants have sponsored several events on the topic around North America over the past six months.

Embrace the trend; plan your attack; update and integrate your policies across functions; implement consciously; train your employees; monitor what’s being said about your company; and manage the process. Those were the key takeaways in Minneapolis.

“Social media defines the online experience today,” Heaps said. Over the last couple of years, the line between social media and mainstream websites has blurred, he observed. “You go to your favorite newspaper site and you see comments, profiles, people interacting. The social concept has been applied to virtually every website.”

Citing a recent study by Brunswick Group, Heaps reported that 47 percent of buy-side and sell-side players surveyed in the US and Europe were prompted to research an issue and 20 percent made an investment decision or recommendation based on information from a blog. Nearly two-thirds of the US survey group expects blogs and social media to play an increasingly important role in investment decision-making in the future.

While social media raises new issues for publicly-traded corporations that must conduct their investor relations communications within the limits of a variety of laws and regulations, the challenges are not insurmountable – and the overall value of social media to enhance a company’s image and communications with customers, shareholders, clients, suppliers and other interested parties vastly outweighs the challenges.

Business Week looked at some of that in an article regarding Twitter that was published Thursday, saying, “Companies can work wonders before Twitter’s vast interactive audience of consumers, but it’s best to start slowly and build credibility.”

Says Business Week: “Business uses for Twitter are proving to be as diverse as those for the telephone or e-mail. They generally break into two categories: ways to follow customers and ways to increase efficiency.” Note that neither of those categories sounds much like a one-way marketing communications channel. In fact, says Business Week, “Companies who try to use the tool as yet another marketing arrow in their quiver—one that mostly carries targeted, one-way messages—usually fail.”

Twitter – and social media in general – is not a marketing channel, but a conversation conduit. Companies that use it that way will derive real value from doing so; companies that use it merely as a way to distribute the latest “company line” more than likely won’t.

Incidentally, the same is true for political candidates and campaigns.

Common Sense: Anonymous Blogging is a Permalink to America's Past

The Federal Trade Commission has released new regulations will add a layer of difficulty for companies hoping to promote their products, services or point-of-view via blogs and other social media. As the New York Times reports, the FTC…

…said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares. The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.

The regulations deserve to face a court challenge on First Amendment grounds, but until they do and are struck down, companies and organizations that want to pitch their products or services via the social media should implement procedures to help bloggers and other social media users to comply with the FTC regs.

It is unclear how the FTC’s new regulations will affect political bloggers, who often accept “free” access to candidates and political events that they are writing about, or companies which are using the social media to promote a point of view or message rather than a commercial product or service, though Mesh Media Strategies is fairly confident that relevant case law would protect such communications from FTC meddling.

Transparency – the apparent intent of the FTC regulations – is a generally good principle for businesses and bloggers to follow, but there are times when it is legitimate for a company to prefer a measure of anonymity in its communications – especially when politics and government are involved. These days, for example, some health care-related businesses might fear the consequences of coming out publicly in opposition to the current administration’s push for centralizing control of health care in the hands of the federal government, yet still wish to try to influence the debate by working through third-party communicators such as independent bloggers. Or conservative Christian home-schoolers afraid of heavy-handed judges and public-school bureaucrats might prefer to write their blog posts regarding home-schooling, politics and such under a pseudonym.

That is – and should remain – their First Amendment right to do so, and such anonymous writing is a tradition older than the United States of America. In January of 1776, the ppolitical pamphlet Common Sense, urging for revolution and independence, was published anonymously. Only later was the identity of the author – Thomas Paine – revealed.

eBay CEO John Donahoe

EBay CEO John Donahoe has started using a pocket-sized video camera and the company’s internal blog to connect with eBay employees. The Wall Street Journal reports…

Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder. He’s posted many of these to a video blog for eBay’s internal employees.

In an interview, Donahoe said he got the idea to videotape and share his encounters in the spring from Cisco CEO John Chambers, who also makes videos with the Flip camera. (Cisco bought Flip maker Pure Digital earlier this year.)

“It was like a light bulb going off for me,” said Donahoe of his conversation with Chambers at a Microsoft conference. “I don’t have time to write a blog, and [text blogs] also have the problem that they can get spread virally.” So he bought a Flip camera (on eBay, of course) and started informally recording his encounters and other thoughts to share with eBay’s staff.

“I’m trying to drive a much more customer-focused organization,” said Donahoe. “It has such a powerful impact on me. I want to use it to educate all of our employees and also celebrate some of our sellers.”

What really impresses me with what Donahoe is doing is that he is playing a central role in this social media effort, but in a way that deliberately takes the spotlight off himself. Instead, he is forging a new role for himself as a communications connector between eBay employees and eBay merchants – and as the WSJ story goes on to show, eBay already is reaping tangible benefits from it.

Cheap digital social media technology makes it possible for Donahoe – and for the leader of almost any company or organization – to create such new connections and conversations that were previously difficult to create and sustain. Increased transparency, new connections and conversations open the door to new possibilities.

If he continues with this video-interview-blogging effort, Donahoe should expect the unexpected.
He’s likely to see a lot more light bulbs going off.

Incidentally, the Flip camera is a great product, but it’s not the onlytool that works for this purpose. The new iPhone 3Gs shoots video and allows on-device editing – and can be used to post directly to a blog, YouTube or a social media site like Facebook. With the Flip, you have to be able to download the video to a PC or laptop, edit it, and then post it. On the other hand, Flip has high-def models, the iPhone doesn’t, so far.

MR. GREGORY: …the fact that in this, in this media age, what he said, by anybody’s estimation, was objectionable, to sign a petition saying the government was behind 9/11. But it goes to something that’s going on in this information age…

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, yeah…

MR. GREGORY: …which is you can be a target real fast.

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, when everyone has a cell phone, everyone’s a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone’s a filmmaker. And when everyone’s a blogger, everyone’s in newspaper. When everyone’s a photographer, a newspaper and a filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids, OK, tell your kids, OK, be careful. Every move they make is now a digital footprint. You are on “Candid Camera.” And unfortunately, the real message to young people, from all of these incidents, OK, and I’m not here defending anything anyone said, but from all of these incidents, is you know, really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges, and maybe you too–you know, when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso, you’ll be able to get through the hearing.

Friedman is right – at first – but then goes overboard.

Yes, in an era when everyone has or can have a cell phone, YouTube and a blog, everyone can, theoretically, be a photographer, filmmaker and newspaper. That’s the empowerment enabled by cheap digital technologies for producing and distributing content. And, yes, what people create and post online leaves a digital footprint that will likely reside on some server somewhere forever.

But Friedman goes overboard when he says people should, in reaction, “really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges.”

Wrong.

What people should do in this current golden age of grassroots media is, think before they speak – or post online, because actions have consequences and when you publish via the online media you are making your content available to a potentially global audience. Bcause the new media is interactive and decentralized, you know not where your message will go, or who will respond to it, or how they will respond – or what social media format they will use to carry their response.

Say what you believe, and be prepared to act like you meant it. The social media is not a trap for those who follow those rules.

But as the state-run company grows, it is attracting the scrutiny of Brazilian investigative journalists and senators who worry that billions of petrodollars might be put to political use. And that’s not sitting well with Petrobras CEO José Sergio Gabrielli, a left-leaning former economics professor and close adviser to Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. While the Brazilian government holds 38% of the publicly traded Petrobras shares, it controls 55% of the voting rights.

In May, the Brazilian Senate launched an inquiry to determine if Petrobras had evaded more than $2 billion in taxes by channeling funds to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) run by political allies of President Lula in the runup to next year’s presidential elections. It also started looking into alleged overpayments for ships and pipelines. That’s when Gabrielli—frustrated by newspaper reports that he complained were tendentious and quoted him out of context—ordered his public relations team to create a blog called Petrobras—Facts and Figures.

“We’re Going to Defend Ourselves”

Gabrielli says he personally signs off on many of the company’s daily postings on the blog, which is published only in Portuguese. The idea is to rebut what he calls “false information” in the Brazilian press about the company. But the site, which has had more than 1.5 million visitors, is raising questions about whether one of the region’s most respected state-run companies is harming its reputation by being so combative. “We’re going to defend ourselves,” Gabrielli told a reporter from leading newspaper Folha de São Paulo in late June, in a Q&A posted on the blog. “Attacking is also part of defending oneself.”

One of the first things the Petrobras blog did was to publish the entire transcript of an interview Gabrielli granted to a major newspaper—before the newspaper’s article appeared. That infuriated journalists throughout Brazil, who claimed that their questions are the intellectual property of their publications—and in any case, out of courtesy, should not be aired before an article appears in print.

Petrobras agreed to wait until midnight before an article’s publication to post transcripts on the Web, but it still takes a no-holds-barred approach to rebutting, point by point, every major news report.

Petrobras avoids making inflammatory statements about journalists in its daily postings. But its pointed rebuttals spawn vociferous reader comments that accuse journalists of working for political parties or belonging to a conspiracy to turn over Brazil’s oil riches to foreign oil companies. One blog post by a reader identified as Da Torre said that “the Folha [de São Paulo] never tires of making up facts to denigrate Petrobras’ image. Could it be that they are working for the multinationals to knock Petrobras down and…grab the best thing Brazil has, its oil?”

Mesh Media Strategies has always advised its clients who may be interviewed by the media – any media – to record the interview and be prepared to use it to combat misleading media reports which use bits of the interview out of context. This applies to both corporate clients and political candidates. Ideally, the interview should be video-recorded, with cameras on both the reporter and the interviewee. Immediately after the interview is concluded, a verbatim transcript of the interview should be made, and the video or audio of the interview should be prepared for uploading to the web. YouTube is a good platform for video, while a corporate or campaign blog can easily handle an audio file as a “podcast.”

No corporate CEO, organization leader, business owner or political candidate should ever do a media interview without recording it – and no corporate CEO, organization leader, business owner or political candidate should agree to an interview with any media outlet that refuses such conditions.

I have been on both sides of this issue.

Several years ago, I managed to land an interview with music superstar Garth Brooks as his fame was peaking – an interview not for an entertainment magazine, but for a business magazine called Business Nashville. (Today, it’s called Business TN.) The focus of the interview was not music but money and Brooks’ approach to business. In granting the interview, Brooks’ people asked that he be allowed to record the interview.

I had no problem with that request, because I had no agenda in doing the story. I was going to record the interview to ensure accuracy, and didn’t mind if he did the same. I tell clients today, if the media doesn’t want you to record the interview and post the recording or a transcript, they’ve got an agenda.

Brooks did the interview but, as it turns out, his people didn’t record it. They did ask to review the quotes we selected for the story, and although all of the quotes were verbatim, Brooks did ask – not demand – that we delete one sentence because the situation he was talking about – ironically, involving Brooks and a dispute with a major national newspaper – had been resolved since the interview. The quote was accurate but the context had changed, so I made the edit. The result: An accurate story.

Garth Brooks didn’t need to record the interview because I came to it with no hidden agenda, but today’s professional news media is so rife with bias and agendas that you can’t take that chance. Even if the media isn’t biased or coming at you with a hidden agenda, the chances are still high that you will be misquoted or information you give will be used in the wrong context. No member of the media knows more about your business or your campaign than you do, which means there is a good chance they’ll get it wrong.

Having audio or video recordings and a verbatim transcript means you can quickly respond when they do.

Transparency is a two-way street – a media outlet which demands transparency but refuses to grant it is not to be trusted.

More than half (57 percent) said their peers used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking. And 92 percent said they used MySpace or Facebook regularly. Two-thirds said their generation was more self-promoting, overconfident and attention-seeking than others.

The survey was conducted by Jean Twenge, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, but not everyone agrees with its conclusions.

“We all kind of put on our best face when presenting ourselves in social situations, online or offline,” says Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing who studies social networking. “When good things happen to me, I put that on Facebook, and when bad things happen, I also put it on Facebook. It’s a structure to receive emotional support.”Houston Dougharty, vice president for student affairs at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, says today’s students are altruistic and care about helping others, which doesn’t say “narcissism” to him. “I think there’s a negative connotation to narcissism that I would not want to promote as a description of this generation.” Social networking is “a celebration of individuality and sort of promotion of one’s own personality,” he says.

The best use of social networking – whether it be a blog, or Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or other tools – to promote your personal brand, business or campaign is not based in narcissism, but in reaching out to others, to share your expertise with them and establish a conversation.

VoteStacey.com

Mesh Media Strategies’ current projects include VoteStacey.com, the website of Tennessee state Senate candidate Stacey Campfield, a Knoxville Republican serving his third term in the Tennessee state House.

The goal for the site was simple: A low-cost, easy-to-operate campaign website which incorporated the most useful social networking tools for encouraging grassroots involvement and financial support.

Mission Accomplished: MMS built and launched the initial version of the site in three days, and is continuing to evolve the site as the 2010 campaign cycle rolls along.

If you are a candidate or potential candidate for public office, we invite you to contact MMS for information about our services.

On the Internet, serial brevity could be drowning out verbosity.

The blog is no longer the centre of the average netizen’s online life. More immediate, more networked, more intimate virtual bonds have moved to the forefront—social networking sites such as Orkut or Facebook and microblogging services such as Twitter. The blog, it appears, has taken a back seat. It still, of course, serves as everyone’s personal fount of wisdom, and as the medium du jour for ruminations that require 1,000 words or more (with pictures), but the everyday concerns of an online life have switched adjectives: They’re less blogged, more tweeted.

The good news is, it isn’t a binary choice. You can blog and use Twitter – and other social networking tools and media formats – in whatever arrangement that works best for your business, organization or campaign. For some Mesh Media Strategies clients, that means a full suite of online media – blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc… – combined with traditional media relations aimed at generating news coverage in the traditional media. But we realize that not every client needs us to use every tool in the tool box.

We don’t use one media format to the exclusion of the other because people don’t generally search and use information that way. Your target audience – the people you want to learn more about you, do business with you, support your organization or cause, join your campaign or vote for you – don’t get their information from just one kind of media – print, broadcast or digital. They don’t get their information in only one format at a time – text, audio or video. And they are no longer content to just take in information – they want to interact via the media, and to create their own media.

The headline of this MMS blog post, by the way, will did instantly appear as a Tweet on our Twitter page, along with tweets we’ve posted @meshstrategies independent from this blog. This gives us multiple ways to get our message out – and multiple ways for people to find us online.

In the interest of full disclosure, MMS does not have a client in the race.

While there is still plenty of time for more candidates to jump in, the two “big” candidates known to be running are businessman A.J. McCall, whose multi-generational family-owned furniture and appliance business (D.T. McCall’s) has him on TV in commercials with regularity, and state Rep. Susan Lynn.

Lynn became the first candidate with a website up this week with the launch of SusanLynn.net.

The site is, to be charitable, a design mess, a mishmash of fonts and colors and low-quality clip-art graphics that appear to be salvaged from the wreckage of mid-1990s web design. The “Susan Lynn for State Senate 2010″ banner takes up far too much real estate on the home page, pushing the interesting content down and forcing readers to scroll to find it. And when they do find it…

Functionally, the site is worse. Most of the necessary pieces seem to be there, but it seems obvious that the site was cobbled together by someone who doesn’t understand how to use the internet and social media in a political campaign.

Here are my comments regarding the site:

1. The “Newsletter” link takes readers to a page where they can read old weekly newsletters sent out by the candidate’s state House office – the newsletters can be downloaded as .jpg image files rather than the more common, standard and easily printable PDF. The site should have NEW news, related to the campaign.

2. The “Rumor Mill” feature – designed to respond to rumors and attacks – is a good idea, but the section ought to be a part of the campaign website rather than hosted on a separate blog site, and should share the same design and colors as the main site. The “Blog” link also goes off-site, to the candidate’s pre-existing blog. While MMS would prefer not to have readers leave your site to read your blog, the fact that the blog existed before the campaign site makes this situation understandable.

MMS recently built a site for another state representative running for state senate in a different district, a lawmaker with a pre-existing blog. Rather than just add a link to the candidate’s pre-existing blog, we built the site to automatically pull the latest headlines from the blog and post them to the campaign site in a prominent position, so that the campaign site is updated with fresh content whenever the lawmaker/candidate posts to his blog.

3. The next feature – the “Volunteer” page is actually pretty good. Simple, easy to understand, and meant to give supporters an easy way to get involved in the campaign. Ditto the “Yard Sign” request page – well done.

4. The lists of “Campaign News” and “General Assembly News” headlines are useless. Web readers expect headlines to be hyperlinks to click to read the whole story. The headlines in this campaign site are just text. They go nowhere, and provide too little information.

5. The “Donate” link takes the reader straight to the campaign’s PayPal page – without collecting information required by state campaign donations regulations and without explaining state campaign donation limits. MMS recently completed a site for another candidate for the Tennessee state Senate in a different district who also uses PayPal to collect online contributions, and created a way to handle those two important informational tasks.

6. In terms of social media, the site’s “Facebook” link goes to Facebook’s home page, not to the campaign or candidate’s specific Facebook page. There’s no Twitter link, no YouTube channel, and no use of or apparent provision for future use of video and/or podcasting.

7. The site is not optimized for viewing and use on mobile devices such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

8. And, finally, a major weakness of the site is that it incorporates too much of the candidate’s state legislative content, as if it was meant to be a lawmaker’s constituent-service website rather than a tool for winning a campaign. Contact information is provided for both the campaign and the lawmaker’s General Assembly office. The result is information overload and a lack of focus on the goal. An incumbent lawmaker running for re-election or for another office needs two sites – and the two sites should overlap only minimally, with a single link from the campaign site to the incumbent-lawmaker site as part of the candidate’s bio page. Contact information should be given for the campaign only.

The web and social media are tools of great potential and power for politics and campaigns. This campaign site has left most of that potential and power untapped. The good news: The primary election is more than 11 months away. There’s still time to fix it.

If you’re considering running for the state legislature in your state* and you want a high-quality website that leverages the potential and power but are afraid it costs too much, please contact MMS. We have built websites for state legislative candidates in two election cycles, and we are working on ways to bring down the cost of campaign sites for state legislative candidates while raising their quality and effectiveness.

If you are running to win, you can’t afford not to have a great website.

* MMS only works for mainstream conservative Republican candidates.